News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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Remember when our elected officials represented their constituents? That was before they found it better to represent themselves. Senators Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson come to mind. Let me explain. When living in Bothell, I bought my youngest daughter a horse and kept it at a pasture nearby that was owned by a crusty old cowboy named Homer. I would go down and stand at the fence and watch the horse and chat with Homer. On one occasion, I met a local attorney who also had become friends with Homer, another cowboy of sorts. He told me that...
I had a few years as a motorcycle nut, riding a BSA. The BSA was built by the Birmingham Small Arms Company, which stopped building motorcycles and built war materials instead during World War II. I and my friend, Joe Emerson, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, bought our bikes the same day. Joe had moved to Palouse when his mother, Bertha, took a job with the Northern Pacific Railroad as a telegrapher. They had moved into a house just a few blocks away and the two of us were constant companions. Joe had an older brother, Guy, who...
My daughter Kim lives in Louisiana. She likes it there, just a ew miles from Denham Springs and on the banks of the Amite River. Two main reasons she likes it there are that most of the storms you hear about go around where she lives, and her neighbors are such caring people. The other morning, the humidity there was over 90%. This allows you to breaststroke from the bed to the kitchen in the morning. After a few minutes, she can go out on the deck and have a bug the size of a half dollar land on her arm, and then looking down, you can see a...
The Thai student we sponsored at the University of Washington while living in Bothell keeps coming back to me. His name is Khien, and I have mentioned him in previous columns. He was a college professor in Bangkok and already had his master’s and at that time was working on his doctorate. He had already written a half dozen books and was considered an expert on issues dealing with Mainland China. When I told him I was going to Thailand, he said he would have his nephew take me wherever I wanted to go. His nephew was taking care of his house a...
My boss at the Idaho Statesman in Boise told me when he hired me that when his reporters traveled, they went first class. True to his word, he would always ask me where I was going to stay when assignments took me out of Boise. If he thought of a better place he would ask the lady who made arrangements to change mine. I remember when I was sent to cover the Rose Bowl he changed my hotel accommodations to the Hollywood Hotel, a small but rather luxurious place near Hollywood and Vine. I came to understand that my boss was talking about land...
We all know the role music plays in our lives. Want to raise your spirits? Turn on some music. I have started to hold nightly concerts for my own benefit that can start by 9 p.m. and last until the early hours. I will come back to that in a minute. While living in Bothell years ago, I used to go down to Seattle to an old book and record store — Filippis, no longer in business. In looking through the old 78s, I found a couple of early-day Sons of the Pioneers music. You know, Tumbling Tumbleweeds and such. I bought them along with comedy r...
My wife and I lived the first time in the coulee back in 1953-55. I was a lumber grader down at the mill located above the dam. A fellow by the name of Kirkpatick owned 90% of the operation, and a fellow who ran the logging part of the company the other 10%. Logs were floated down the Columbia River to the mill site. With winter coming on, Kirkpatick advised the workers that the mill would shut down until spring. Not wanting to sit idle all winter, I answered an ad in the Spokesman for a grading job in Livingston, Montana. I threw a few things...
This is a continuation of earlier comments that education in America is not properly funded. I had pointed out that we need to rethink the value of teachers and the way we fund education, teachers included. I read a distressing article the other day that said many of our large cities in the U.S. will have to relocate by the end of the century because they will be unlivable due to climate change. The writer pointed out that regions will get so warm as to make them too hot for people to reside there. What makes this, if true, so distressing, is...
With covid numbers down, people have resumed long delayed travel interest. My family is no exception. It’s a test to balance caution and adventure. It started with my grandson, William, from Portland, closing out last year with a nine-week trip through Europe. How you can talk an employer into letting you go for nine weeks and still have your job waiting for you is beyond me. But he did. As a caution, William donned a mask when around large numbers of people and made the best of it. The overwhelming interest on the trip, which included n...
There is a national shortage of teachers, leaving some districts short of covering all their classrooms. While current events are creating problems in education, not the least of these problems are politics and financial resources. That teachers are underpaid is pretty well understood and agreed upon nationally. Teachers should be paid at least 25% more than they now receive. Something needs to happen nationally to shut down the vast exodus of teachers leaving. In order to provide new teaching recruits, we should provide four-year scholarships...
I got my desire to take drives from my dad who used to take us for rides all the time. He had an old car from the mid 30’s. I remember when my dad got his first new car, it was in the early 40’s before all effort turned to making things for World War II. The local Ford dealer drove up with a new car, came to the door and handed Dad the keys. He told him to drive it and, if he liked it, to come down and they would make a deal on it. In my earlier days, everyone had a canvas water bag hanging from their front bumper. We often drove up into the...
I have always been taught to give something back to society. For years I tried to do so by volunteering or running for public office. I have held office in park boards, library boards and school boards. Most recently I served 17 years on the North Central Regional Library Board and 10 years on the local school board. But there comes a time when that isn’t possible, so I have been trying to find a couple of charities that cover things I can identify with. There are so many needs in our world that could use some help, and people can choose t...
I recently wrote a column on my Aunt Voe. I am writing this column on my Aunt Lorena, just to show how important family is to help younger members grow up. I was born in a farmhouse on Four Mile Creek, just out of Palouse. My parents and siblings had arrived just months before from Minneapolis. My Aunt Lorena, my dad’s youngest sister, just happened to be at the house when delivery was imminent. My father had gone to town to get Dr. Dart, the family doctor, but I guess I decided to enter this world without Dart. The fact that Aunt Lorena did th...
Jesse Owens is probably the country’s most famous Olympic athlete when you consider the setting where he won his four gold medals. Owens won the gold in the 4x100 relay, the 220-yard dash, the 220 low hurdles and the broad jump, in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He won more than the four medals, and he won the public relations tug with Adolph Hitler, who was trying to use the games as a way to show the world that the more traditional Aryan athlete was better than anyone else. Hitler had just come to power and was convinced by Göring that he co...
I have taken a lot of fishing tips over the years. Only one was successful. This was in Kodiak, Alaska. I was there to help the owner of the daily paper prepare her newspaper property for sale. It needed a lot of tweaking. I had been up there on several occasions, and on one of these trips the owner of the paper scheduled me to go out on a charter boat for halibut. The day of the trip, she showed up at the dock to introduce me to the skipper of the boat. They were obviously friends, and the skipper said he would look after me. The boat was 50...
One of the things my wife and I loved to do was walk in the sand dunes. To do that you have to have special places where the sand bunches up. Death Valley produced one such place, the mesquite dunes. Death Valley to some is the last place they would ever go. Gotta get off the freeway and you will see some special things. We have been there quite a few times, staying at Pantamont Springs, a motel across the road from some beautiful dunes. You have to remember one thing about Death Valley: it gets very hot there. We challenged the dunes early in...
When my wife and I used to hike, we thought in miles, the fewer the better. We would never have thought in the hundreds of miles. Jaci Gross and her 72-year-old mother, Jeanne, are underway on a 400-mile pilgrimage to Santiago, Spain. They left the states Tuesday for Lisbon, Portugal, from where they will walk the 400 miles to the Cathedral at Santiago, where the apostle St. James the Great, is buried. Jaci has been on feverish walks from her home in Coulee Dam to Steamboat Rock State Park several times a week, and also, for a change, to Nespel...
When an area suddenly becomes popular, it ruins it for people who already lived there. There’s a lot of examples of this. I don’t think it could happen here, but you never know if we will be discovered someday. While living in Boise, we often drove up to Silver City, an old mining town about 75 miles into the higher country. The roads were carved out of clay, so it wasn’t a good idea to drive there after a rain. There were a few old buildings still standing, a few in good repair. It wasn’t long before the area became popular with the Boise crow...
My Aunt Voe used to put me up in an upstairs feather bed when I would visit. I don’t know what kind of feathers she used, but they made an extremely soft mattress and likewise the sleep. Voe was what you could correctly say “old fashioned.” Yet she was a counselor to many of the younger members of the family. She was the postmaster at the Palouse post office, knew everyone in town, and more about them than was necessary. Anyway, Voe had a foot in both worlds — one in the early 1900s and the other in what were then modern times. In additio...
There are always a few who know what they want to do after graduating from high school. My great granddaughter, Kaylee Landeros, has already been accepted at Eastern Washington University and soon will go to the campus to plan her schedule of classes for fall. I had no idea what I would do when I went through the diploma process back in 1948. I wasn’t alone. Several in my class loaded up and went to Walla Walla to work in the cannery. I remember we had 11-and-a-half-hour shifts, seven days a week. Low pay, but lots of overtime. Six of us r...
Memorial Day can be a special occasion. It is meant to be a day of remembering family members and close friends who have passed on. It is a time when you can reflect on the good times enjoyed with those who have been closest to you. When I return home to Palouse, which I plan to do in a few weeks, the first place I always go is to the cemetery where my parents and grandparents are buried. There are a number of others that were close to me buried there. How fortunate we are that our society sets apart a special day to do this. At my parents’ g...
Summers in Palouse when I was a kid meant carnivals and the circus. They held the carnivals just off Main Street and next to the downtown gym. My brother Bob got kicked out of the carnival one summer. They had a monkey on a chain, and it was a popular attraction. Well Bob, who was always pushing the envelope, pushed a little too much. He was teasing the monkey, and the animal would make it out to the end of the chain. Bob didn’t calculate distance too well, and the monkey got on him, causing a stir. Every carny at the site thought Bob was h...
I have been tracing my Lucas family back as far as the mid 17th century in LaRochelle, France. I can’t seem to get past Jean Lucas, so for now he is the patriarch of the family. The family followed the teachings of John Calvin and finally left France for Germany and the long emigration to escape to the New World. Part of the family went to Ireland, but my branch went to England to pursue Queen Anne’s pledge to pay their passage to New York. The family took refuge in a fleet of 10 ships who were waiting out the winter for spring sailing. The...
Why am I so lucky? I have a new great granddaughter, at least new to me. She was born the day that President Biden took office, Jan. 20, 2021. I saw Autumn once before, in Spokane at the hospital, but last weekend she was at the house, so I really got an opportunity to watch her closely. She is really mobile and walks all over. Her mother and father are Camille and Mark Fabian. No one can know the joy of seeing a new family generation arrive. As they say “out with the old and in with the new.” I wonder what circumstances await little Aut...
I guess these places won’t be secret now. This weekend I visited one of our secret places, Hawk Creek campground. My wife and I used to prepare a picnic lunch and drive to Hawk Creek for one of our outings. I will miss this. There is a high waterfall there that you can walk to and let the roar and splash of the water wash away the cares of the world. This time I went with my oldest son Paul and his wife Cindy. I have had, and my wife and I together have had, many such places. After all, that’s the stuff memories are made of. I had such places e...